Entertainment

Steve Schirripa and Michael Imperioli talk ‘The Sopranos’ at 25, Rhode Island, and more

Ahead of shows with Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore, the pals look back at the show that changed TV.

Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa

By Lauren Daley

November 23, 2024

11 minutes to read

Steve Schirripa and his pal love Westerly, R.I.

The beaches, the theater — the meatballs.

By his pal, I mean lil’ Willieboy, of course. Instagram’s favorite pizza-loving dog.

“The Sopranos” alum loves to take his #dogstagram star to Longo Ristorante Pizzeria in Westerly for their meatball fix.

But yes, his other pal, Michael Imperioli, loves the food there, too. (“They know how to cook pasta to the right consistency,” Imperioli noted last summer.)

So when Schirripa, Imperioli and Vinny “Big Pussy” Pastore are in the Ocean State this weekend, Schrippia tells me they’ll hit up the Westerly joint “for the best meatballs in the country, as far as I’m concerned.”

Schirripa — who played Uncle Junior’s right-hand-man, the model-train-loving Bobby “Bacala” on The Sopranos — has spoken to me at length about his love of Rhode Island before.

It’s one reason, he tells me, that he wanted to bring “Conversations with Sopranos Live – 25th Anniversary Tour with Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa, and Vincent Pastore” to Westerly’s small theater, The United Theatre.

It’s a small theater and already sold-out. But “I like that United Theater — it’s a beautiful theater. And you know I love Westerly,” he tells me in a phone interview from his southern California home. (I do.)

If you missed out, mark your calendar for their next New England stop: The Palace Theater in Waterbury, Connecticut, on Jan. 25.

I caught up with Schirripa, 67, and Imperioli, 58, co-hosts of the HBO podcast “Talking Sopranos” and co-authors of the New York Times bestselling “Woke Up This Morning.”

The live show

The live shows are relaxed, Schirripa says.

“Comedian Joey Kola travels with us. Very funny guy. Joey comes out, does about 15 minutes, then we show clips,” Schirripa tells me. “Then the three of us come out, Joey asks us questions, and we tell funny stories, funny behind-the-scenes stories that only people that were there would know. Very loose. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not serious. We have drinks. This isn’t PBS.”

Imperioli adds, “The last part is the most fun because we open it up to the audience and you never know what people will ask.”

And boy, do they have questions.

“Oh, man, they ask all kinds of stuff,” Imperioli tells me in a phone interview from his New York home. “What certain things mean — like 3 o’clock, which comes up a lot in the show. A lot of people, to be honest, know the show better than we do. They’ve watched it more, they’ve studied it — some of these fans are quite obsessed.”

And of course, they want to know about the ending.

Schirripa told me previously that his thoughts have changed over the years. “I used to always think Tony Soprano was alive and well … After doing the podcast, I kind of think he’s dead.”

Imperioli tells me, “I always interpreted it as it’s the last thing Tony sees before he dies.”

But when it aired, his first thought “was that the cable went out. I’d talked to David — because I was also a writer on the show at times — so I had conversations about story, and I remember him saying, ‘Everything goes to black’ at least a year before we shot the end. I didn’t really quite take that in. When it happened, I forgot he’d said that. The next day, I was like, ‘Ohhh, that’s what he was talking about.’”

It may have felt vague to some, but Imperioli says, “What would have been a more satisfying ending? If he was murdered in front of us? Shot in front of his family? If he killed the New York boss? What would have been satisfying? In some ways, it was the perfect way to end.”

The podcast

“The Sopranos” aired from 1999 to 2007 — but until they started the podcast in 2020, neither actor had rewatched episodes since the original air-dates.

“When the show was over, we all moved on. I didn’t want to look back,” Imperioli says. “Then Jim passed away in 2013 and I really didn’t want to look at it. When we did the podcast, we had to look. The beauty was, a lot of time had passed — we weren’t so wrapped up in it. Watching the show while we were doing it was strange because you’re worried about your own performance, where your character was going, this and that. [By 2020] we were way past all that, so we were finally able to almost watch it as a fan.”

“Looking at it just as a viewer — it’s really entertaining,” Imperioli says. Held against “a lot of other great shows it gets compared to — “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad” — “The Sopranos” had this other level of entertainment. Sometimes it was a slapstick-comedy.”

Schirripa adds, “You got to remember, we didn’t watch the show for 20 years, me and Michael. When you’re in it, you don’t realize how good it is. But looking back, you go, ‘Wow.’”

In working on the podcast, they also learned a lot. Both told me they were shocked to learn that Jerry Stiller, aka “Seinfeld’s” Frank Costanza, was cast as Hesh.

(I mean, we all are. “I’m like the Phoenix, rising from Arizona, Tony!”)

“Jerry actually had the role,” Schirripa told me previously. “He was supposed to start work Monday; he took a commercial on a Friday because it paid more.”

Favorite episodes

“My favorite is ‘Whitecaps,’ because the acting between Jim [Gandolfini] and Edie [Falco] is just incredible,” says Schirripa. “That’s as good acting as you’ll ever see. Of course, ‘Pine Barrens.’ I like ‘The Lake House’ because of the big fight with Bobby and Tony.”

Imperioli also loves “Pine Barrens.”

(We all do. It’s a T-shirt for a reason.)

“And I love ‘The Ride,’” Imperioli says. “There was that sequence to the song ‘The Dolphins’ [by Fred Neil] and Christopher’s high on heroin. He goes to the feast. That’s a personal favorite. I love the intervention episode [‘The Strong, Silent Type’] just as far as intensity and depth. I love ‘Long Term Parking,’ when I find out Adriana is working with the feds. That was a challenging one.”

The auditions

Growing up in Brooklyn, Schirripa didn’t want to be an actor. “Not at all,” he told me previously. “I never knew what I wanted to be.”

He majored in phys ed at Brooklyn College, “but then I student-taught, and didn’t think I’d be any good. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went to Vegas, was a maître d’, a bouncer, worked my way up to hotel executive.

In Vegas, “Comics would put me in a little sketch; I liked it. Then somebody else offered something else. A casting person saw me and offered me something else … I got the bug.”

A small role in “Casino” earned him a SAG card. (“They didn’t put me in the credits, which annoyed me.”)

Imperioli, meanwhile, wanted to be pre-med at one point. “But I never made it that far. I wound up going to acting school,” he tells me.

Growing up in New York, “I loved Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep. I started reading a lot of plays in my high school library. I read Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in 10th grade English, and my teacher said, ‘You know, you should join the drama club.’”

That idea, though, “was not appealing. I didn’t want to be on stage in front of my high school class. But I did start thinking: Did I want to be a writer? Director? Producer? Actor? But those things seemed impossible. I’m from a blue-collar family from New York. It was, how do you go into that business? It seemed like such a crapshoot.”

He went to Lee Strasberg Institute “and started making my way.”

Meanwhile, he worked “mostly in the restaurant business.” He was determined to make it as an actor, though “there were times I thought it would be impossible. The rejection was so overwhelming that I was like, ‘This could maybe never happen.’ The first four or five years, it was a lot of that.”

“I always tell people: you have to be in it for the long-run. You have to just say: ‘I’m gonna stick it out.’ Even after having success, sometimes you’re out of work for a while,” Imperioli said. “It’s unpredictable.”

A big break came with landing the role of Spider in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.”

“At the same time, after that movie came out, I was still working in restaurants. I did start getting cast more, mostly independent movies. But it was another couple of years before I was making a living,” Imperioli says.

I’d always thought it interesting that so many “Goodfellas” actors — about 27 — were cast on “The Sopranos.” Imperioli explained, “How it really worked was David [Chase] saw a movie, ‘Trees Lounge,’ (1996) directed, written and starring Steve Buscemi. David loved the casting. So he hired [those casting directors] Sheila Jaffe and Georgianne Walken — Georgianne being the wife of Christopher Walken. I’d done several movies with them; they would always bring me in if I was remotely right for anything. That’s really how that came about.”

He adds, “The Italian American acting community in New York is kind of small, to be honest. A lot of us on ‘The Sopranos’ had worked together on a number of things beforehand. I didn’t know Steve Schirripa, because he was in Vegas.”

Schirripa told me previously he originally auditioned for the role of a lieutenant on “The Sopranos,” but casting directors thought he was a better Bobby.

At the time, though, “I was an executive at a hotel in Las Vegas, dabbling in acting as a hobby.” When they called him back for Bobby, “I wasn’t going to do it because I didn’t want to spend the money [on the flight and hotel], to be honest. [My wife] urged me: ‘You’re only happy when you’re doing this,’ so I did it.”

Imperioli auditioned for Christoper right away.

“Oh, I loved the character,” he tells me. “I love the fact that he really wanted success, that he was interested in Hollywood, interested in being a mob boss. That he was a drug addict. He had a lot of obstacles, and he was always battling them. The stakes were always very high for that character — for an actor, that’s gold.”

Of course, prestige TV didn’t exist at the time.

“An HBO series was like the bargain basement of television” at the time, Imperioli says. The pilot “was really a long shot — I didn’t think much was going to come of it.”

A surprise: the pilot was greenlit. A year later, they shot season one.

Still, “it’s really hard to tell how far the series would go, and how deep it would go, and how interesting it would be,” Imperiolli says. ”There wasn’t any series on cable. The cursing, nudity, violence — are people going to want to watch this show?”

There was a magic to the show, both agree.

“David had taken it to numerous places, he couldn’t get it on, it landed at HBO, which was the right spot,” Schrippia says. “I think it’s held up. I think it’s a very smart show. It’s deep.”

Death scenes

So what did Imperioli think of the way Christopher died?

“I thought it made a lot of sense, in terms of how it starts between Tony and Christopher. Christopher is really a kid in the pilot. He’s in his 20s; he’s very childish. Throughout the series, he really evolves and matures in ways, taking on more adult problems and responsibilities,” he tells me.

“Their relationship going from Tony being a father-figure, to Tony being a rival — it was an interesting journey,” he said. For Christopher, to end up shot by Tony, was “an important part of Tony’s story — that’s how far he had to go. To murder someone who was kind of his protege, kind of like a son. But at the end of the day, it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

Schirripa told me previously, when Bobby died — in season 6, episode 20 – “at that point, it didn’t matter, because the show was over. If they’d killed me off sooner, I would’ve felt terrible. Vinnie Pastore [Big Pussy] got killed in season 2. You’re out of work, let’s not kid ourselves.”

Gang’s all here

A quarter century after the finale, “The Sopranos” cast remains tight.

In June, a slew talked “Sopranos” for a 25th anniversary at Tribeca Film Fest. It was also a celebration of HBO’s “Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos,” about the creator, head writer, and executive producer of the show. That special is streaming now on MAX.

Of course, this trio of buddies are on tour telling tales now. On stage, they talk often about two late great pals, Gandolfini and Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico.

Schrippia remains close with Uncle Ju, actor Dominic Chianese. “I just saw Dominic, he’s 93 years old. He lives in London,” said Schrippia. (His Instagram post (#pals) will give you all the feels.)

“I see Edie [Falco] at the Knicks games. She’s a big Knicks fan, as I am,” he adds.

Imperioli says he’s friends with “a lot” of the old gang. “A lot of us knew each other [from before the show] and then having this big success together bonded us even further. It was a very meaningful ride.”

Current day

Both have been busy. Imperioli starred in HBO’s “White Lotus” before making his Broadway debut with “Succession” alum Jeremy Strong earlier this year.

You can see him now in the current season of “American Horror Story” streaming on Hulu, and in “Oh Canada,” co-starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman and Jacob Elordi.

Schirripa, meanwhile, is wrapping CBS’s “Blue Bloods” with his Massachusetts co-stars Donnie Wahlberg and Bridget Moynahan. The finale airs Dec. 13. Schirripa played Detective Anthony Abetemarco three times as long as he played Bobby on “The Sopranos.”

And yes, Willieboy starred in a final season episode. “He has a scene with Bridget Moynihan and Peter Herman. He was very good on set. Very patient. And he was treated like a king.”

(Idea: Willieboy-spinoff.)

What’s next for Schirripa?

“If something good comes my way. I’ll do it. If not, I’m just looking to hang out. I’ve worked for 24 years straight as an actor — before then 20 years in the casino business. I’ve been working a long time,” he tells me. “I got a couple of ideas, another book, maybe. When I did the other shows, I was always worried – I gotta work, gotta work. I don’t have that pressure. If I want to work, I will, if not — we ride off into the sunset.”

Either way, Willieboy will be at his side.

“Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t say, Where’s Willie? They stop me in New York — ‘Is that Willie?!’ ‘Can I take a picture with him?’” Schirripa says with a laugh. “They don’t want to take a picture with me. But they see Willie, and they’re stunned.”Lauren Daley is a freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here.

Lauren Daley

Lauren Daley is a longtime culture journalist. As a regular contributor to Boston.com, she interviews A-list musicians, actors, authors and other major artists.

Sign up for the Today newsletter

Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.

Steve Schirripa and Michael Imperioli talk ‘The Sopranos’ at 25, Rhode Island, and more